Over the Christmas period I decided to create a discord bot that would be useful to my friends in World of Warcraft. 

It's a simple bot that can analyze a player's dungeon runs, calculate what they can do to improving their Mythic+ Rating, and it will then return that data to the user, in a nicely formatted way which will show them where they can earn the best improvements.

I first shared it simply with the people in my guild, and people who had friends outside of the guild loved the bot and wanted to add it to their own server.

Soon afterwards I created a small website to allow people to easily add the bot to their own server, and to get more information about the bot.

The next step was to make a reddit post, advertising the bot to more people. Overnight, the Mythic Rating Helper bot went from being in just 5 servers to almost 80 servers, reaching over 3000 people in total. From there, it's continued to grow.

At first, there were 2 small features that came with the bot. Firstly, how to improve your best dungeon runs. Secondly, how to improve your second best dungeon runs.

To give a bit more context to that, World of Warcraft currently has 8 max level dungeons. A player's Mythic+ Rating is calculated by their best run, and their second best run, of each dungeon.

Since then, I've listened to feedback to improve the usability of the bot and added new features, like being able to simulate your rating if you were to complete all dungeons on a specified level.

As of the time of writing this blog post, Mythic Rating Helper is now active in 187 discord servers, totalling to 10,592 people.

This was beyond anything I ever expected when I began development on Mythic Rating Helper, it has taught me just how many people 1 post can reach.

Naturally, with such a large audience, that brought a lot of other challenges. For example, when pushing new code, ensuring that it didn't interfere with when a user was using the bot. When the code was pushed, the bot would briefly go offline whilst it built the new codebase, meaning I had to keep an eye on both EU & US users. I also had to start answering questions for users, debugging issues they were having. For example: users not giving the bot permission to the channel, cyrillic characters not being encoded correctly within the bot, etc.

Another challenge arrived when I reached 75 servers - I had to get my bot verified by Discord. The bot still isn't verified by them, but the bot's maximum number of servers had been increased by 150%.

If you're interested in testing the bot, you can join my discord server.